The GnuTLS trac installation is in a poor shape. To fix that, I looked into alternatives and found Redmine. Redmine appears to do most things that I liked in Trac (wiki, roadmap and issue tracking) plus it supports more than one project (would come in handy for my other projects) and has built-in git support. I would like to see better spam handling and OpenID support, but it is good enough for our purposes now, and there are similar concerns with trac.

However, getting it up and running with lighttpd on a modern debian lenny installation was not trivial, and I needed some help from #redmine (thanks stbuehler). After finally getting it up and running, I made a copy of the machine using rsync and rsnapshot, so I could re-create a working configuration if I get stuck, and then re-installed the virtual machine.

The notes below are the steps required to set up Redmine using Lighttpd and MySQL on a Debian Lenny. I’m posting this to help others searching for the error messages I got, and to help my own memory in case I need to re-install the server sometime.
I assume you have installed Debian Lenny, and have root access to it. You need to install some dependencies:

Starting the lighttpd server at this point results in an error message:

li37-61:~# /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart
Stopping web server: lighttpd.
Starting web server: lighttpd.
li37-61:~#
2008-10-17 04:50:03: (mod_fastcgi.c.1047) the fastcgi-backend /home/redmine/redmine/public/dispatch.fcgi failed to start:
2008-10-17 04:50:03: (mod_fastcgi.c.1051) child exited with status 9 /home/redmine/redmine/public/dispatch.fcgi
2008-10-17 04:50:03: (mod_fastcgi.c.1054) If you’re trying to run PHP as a FastCGI backend, make sure you’re using the FastCGI-enabled version.
You can find out if it is the right one by executing ‘php -v’ and it should display ‘(cgi-fcgi)’ in the output, NOT ‘(cgi)’ NOR ‘(cli)’.
For more information, check http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/wiki/Docs%3AModFastCGI#preparing-php-as-a-fastcgi-programIf this is PHP on Gentoo, add ‘fastcgi’ to the USE flags.
2008-10-17 04:50:03: (mod_fastcgi.c.1358) [ERROR]: spawning fcgi failed.
2008-10-17 04:50:03: (server.c.908) Configuration of plugins failed. Going down.

FastCGI modules are not installed by default, so you will need to install them:

li37-61:~# apt-get install libfcgi-ruby1.8

Restarting the server again, and accessing dispatch.fcgi using your browser, will result in errors like: